"Commentary from P.M. Carpenter"

December 28, 2012

The GOP's new mascot: the Cheshire cat

While it's fun to wargame potential coalitions between House Democrats and their yet-pathologized Republican counterparts, eventually reality intervenes and insists on re-terrorizing us. This, for example, from Cook Political Report, via Politico:

[J]ust six Republicans--around 3 percent of the House GOP Conference--will occupy districts whose overall voter makeup favors Democrats. That figure is down from 22 Republicans that resided in such Democrat-friendly districts in 2012.

Perhaps the most relentless reality-distorter in our wargaming amusements is the varying headcount of the Tea Party and Tea Party-aligned caucus within the 113th Congress's House Republican conference. Observers routinely cite anywhere from 50 to 80 of these yokels--they'll be the problem, we hear; they'll be the ones so disagreeably haunting all of John Boehner's moderate dreams--yet the actual number is closer to 227 (233 minus the above six). The reason for such realistic yokel-inflation is simple: "Establishment" Republicans who fear Tea Party primary challengers will vote as de facto Tea Partiers.

And that, further, is why some formal schism--either an institutional split between the Republican Party and the Tea Party, or the Tea Party-cum-GOP versus an inchoate Conservative Party--is essential to conservatism's survival. As long as congressional Republicans at large are subject to the narrow, fanatically pseudoconservative whims of a Tea Party primary base, they cannot vote as traditional Republicans might and thus the party will, in time, Cheshire-like, swallow itself whole.

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The GOP's new mascot: the Cheshire cat

While it's fun to wargame potential coalitions between House Democrats and their yet-pathologized Republican counterparts, eventually reality intervenes and insists on re-terrorizing us. This, for example, from Cook Political Report, via Politico:

[J]ust six Republicans--around 3 percent of the House GOP Conference--will occupy districts whose overall voter makeup favors Democrats. That figure is down from 22 Republicans that resided in such Democrat-friendly districts in 2012.

Perhaps the most relentless reality-distorter in our wargaming amusements is the varying headcount of the Tea Party and Tea Party-aligned caucus within the 113th Congress's House Republican conference. Observers routinely cite anywhere from 50 to 80 of these yokels--they'll be the problem, we hear; they'll be the ones so disagreeably haunting all of John Boehner's moderate dreams--yet the actual number is closer to 227 (233 minus the above six). The reason for such realistic yokel-inflation is simple: "Establishment" Republicans who fear Tea Party primary challengers will vote as de facto Tea Partiers.

And that, further, is why some formal schism--either an institutional split between the Republican Party and the Tea Party, or the Tea Party-cum-GOP versus an inchoate Conservative Party--is essential to conservatism's survival. As long as congressional Republicans at large are subject to the narrow, fanatically pseudoconservative whims of a Tea Party primary base, they cannot vote as traditional Republicans might and thus the party will, in time, Cheshire-like, swallow itself whole.